That HS Bochum Solar Car Team's "Thyssenkrupp Blue.Cruiser" is a thing of beauty. It looks good and is functional. It is amazing that this technology has gotten good enough to allow a battery-electric car to have its cruising range doubled, but it takes a design where load-reduction is a key design constraint in order to work.

The auto industry is still stuck in the 19th century 3-box design derived from ye olde horse and carriage. That includes the Tesla Model 3, which needs like 12 kW to cruise at 60 mph, when these efficient solar cars can be designed to carry 2-4 passengers under the same operating conditions for less than 1/4 of the power. The Stella is an amazing feat of engineering.

I like to imagine building something like the Thyssenkrupp Blue.Cruiser some day, but with all-wheel drive hub motors and about 250 horsepower on tap with the car well under 1,800 lbs and the whole roof and hood covered in solar panels... It takes cues from the Volhart-Sagitta V2, the Bosley GT MkI, and Ferdiand Porsche's Type 64 prototype. It's a practical and functional shape for a sports car that just so happens to be ridiculously efficient. I don't know what max top speed it would have stability at, but its acceleration would be ridiculous and when you didn't need it, its overall load at speed would give a VW 1-litre competition, and you could still theoretically reach double the legal speed limit in most U.S. states on roughly half the horsepower of a Geo Metro...

I'd probably never need a charging station with something like that...

"The goal is to move people across Australia as efficiently as possible, measured by the number of person-km per kilowatt-hour of external energy. The only production electric vehicle with the range to practically do so is the Tesla Model S. Analysing how the Tesla Model S would perform in the Cruiser Class, the difference is clear: the Tesla has an efficiency of 29.4 p-km/kWh. Eindhoven manages 270 p-km/kWh -- over nine times the efficiency. These highly efficient Cruiser vehicles are nearly an order of magnitude beyond the current commercial offerings."

That statistic appears to assume that both cars are fully loaded with passengers, when the reality is that they will more often than not have just 1 person in the vehicle. That is why Wh/mi is a more useful measure. These cars still perform quite admirably in that measure as well.

The Stella is a practical car that could carry 4 people, and its efficiency puts anything made by the auto industry to shame. It's ugly though, and to make it desirable, it needs some ass-hauling capability to compensate for a lack of looks, and is a perfectly feasible proposition for this car.